DISTURBING HISTORY

~~~~~~~~~~

In discussing the "electronic revolution" in publishing that many
claim is now going on, savants often slide into the techno-
determinism most cleverly formulated by Herbert Marshall McCluhan
and put on the robes of old testament prophets. There are serious
dangers in such stances. I would like to address some of these
problems from an historical perspective, and make a pedestrian
proposal that might seem outrageous to some readers familiar with the
discussion of new technologies.

In looking at the history of communications, I will have to deal
quickly with long periods of time. This has its uses, but the great
diversity of the large numbers of individuals involved should not be
forgotten in the process, as is common in contemporary "media"
discussion. This cannot be stressed too much: none of these comments
has any meaning if divorced from the people involved. When
discussing the advent of printing, we must bear in mind the lives not
only of scholar-printers like Aldus or Estienne but also the street
toughs employed by them to cut punches because of their skill with
knives. When speaking of education, we must remember that teachers
have run a wide gamut from sadists who liked to see the backs of
unruly children bleed to sincerely dedicated people who
enthusiastically and selflessly devoted themselves to bettering the lives
of their students, often for wretched pay if any at all. When speaking
of developments in paper making, we must not lose sight of those who
lived their lives in the stench of the mill, resenting every tedious
working day, or those who added to the process in small, slow, and
anonymous increments, spending many sleepless nights trying to
figure out how pulp could be better refined or how drying screens
could be improved. When speaking of the present moment in the
history of communication, we negate the discussion if we do not
consider the many diverse skills and intentions of a mind boggling
number of people who deserve our respect, whatever our differences in
belief and evaluation -- even if this moment should prove a dead end
or if its results should be other than what we expect or want.

Several lines of electronic publishing are now in the works, and
may partially fulfill the claims made by technophiles for electronic
books of the future. You can get a lot of text on a CD-ROM, and if we
get past the puerile "Great Books" approach of "Library of the
Future", it should be feasible to produce tailored CDs that could give
nearly anyone of moderate means the equivalent of a public library. If
the obscenity of censorship can be prevented, the equivalent of
immense libraries on CD-ROM wouldn't be necessary: many libraries
could put their public domain works on-line, and arrangements could
be made to digitize a great deal of work under current copyright.
Some universities are already doing this. Organizations such as
Project Guttenberg digitize standard classics and make them available
in plain ASCII format, a language that can be read by almost all
computers.
Spunk Press has been making Anarchist texts available
on-line for several years. Spunk's library now contains some 1400
items. Spunk's URL is:

http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Jansen/spunk/Spunk_Home.html

You can find my
Light and Dust archive of contemporary poetry,
fiction, and criticism at the following URL:

http://www.thing.net/~grist

Grist On-Line includes a number of other web publishers,
hosted by John Fowler. One line of prophecy combines hardware and
files: reading devices about one by five by eight inches could be
manufactured easily and inexpensively. Instead of turning pages, the
reader would go from screen to screen by scrolling a knob at the side.
Copy for these readers could be sent by modem and down-loaded into
the readers easily. This could significantly reduce production and
distribution costs. Such a reader could be used in virtually any
situation: you could read from it in your favorite chair, at your desk or
workstation, in bed, on a bus or train, in the bathtub, outdoors in the
shade of a tree or on your front porch. Theoretically, the amount and
range of material available could be virtually infinite. In some
instances, it might be desirable to give the person reading from such a
device the option of changing type face or point size -- this could be a
great benefit for people with visual impairments or some kinds of
dyslexia.

Along with the prophets who wax eloquent on the advantages of
electronic publishing, there is also a growing chorus of prophets
decrying the advent of electronic publishing. Perhaps the strongest
line of argument from this group points out the danger of the supplier
of texts becoming a stifling and extortionary monopoly in total control
of transmitted material. Whether under private or government control
matters little: as a negation of free speech and an instrument of
propaganda, this would be a free reader's worst nightmare come true.

This line of prophecy also includes those who fear that
electronic publishing will bring about the end of printed books, thus
reducing the "great accomplishments of western civilization" to the
standardized barbarity of lights blink in a plastic box. My favorite
statement along these lines came from the novelist Paul Metcalf, who
initially expressed reservations about being included in the Light and
Dust archive. Among the usual objections, the following struck me as
irrefutable: Paul said that every computer he'd ever seen looked like it
came from Toys-R-Us, an enormous toy store chain in the U.S.. In
many ways he's right -- computers tend to look like video game sets,
and even the most serious programs they run often resemble such
games.

It would be nice -- perhaps even easy to resolve -- if the
problems of new media leant themselves to simple yes/no,
positive/negative dichotomies. They don't. And, perhaps more
importantly, if they are like other changes in communication, their
main functions in the long run will not be immediately apparent. To
understand the problem better, let's take a step back and look at the
problem in a larger context. Dullness and standardization have been a
long time coming, and only custom, sales technique, and context
prevent us from seeing most books as Toys-R-Us items at the present
time. Bookstore chains like Waldens, Daltons, and Borders could just
as well be called Books-R-Us. It's taken quite a bit of preparation to
get us ready for Books-R-Us, much of it institutional, and much of it
in the name of education, culture, child rearing, and progress.

The main course of writing in western civilization has been
towards ease of assimilation. Although most writers on the subject act
as cheerleaders for this movement, each step has involved loss of one
sort or another. Apparently the largest transition was from signs with
intrinsic pictorial and symbolic value to characters that recorded
speech. We can see some of the loss involved in this transition if we
compare the Roman alphabet with the Chinese writing system.
Although a European language such as Latin may be more flexible
and easier to learn, there are expressive potentials in the graphic and
etymological components of written Chinese that simply don't exist in
the Roman alphabet.

The first phonetic scripts represented consonant phonemes only;
a giant step came with additional symbols to represent vowels. The
clarity and grace of the Roman alphabet as it existed by the fourth
century A.D. apparently contributed to the ability of at least a few
people to read silently. Roman political structure also permitted
publishing in something like the modern sense of the word. Though
the Romans had no printing presses, they did control plantations in
Egypt where slaves grew papyrus plants; another class of slaves made
papyrus sheets; and another transcribed books dictated to them in
large sweatshops. Separating words from each other by putting spaces
between them, combining majuscules and minuscules to create the
distinction between what we now call (following later printing
practices) upper and lower case letters, the addition and
diversification of punctuation took place slowly over many centuries.
These developments contributed more to the possibility of printing
from moveable types than any other factor.

Earlier writing systems required close cooperation between
student and teacher, and between mature reader and community.
Reading was not a solitary practice, nor was it silent. It was a form of
social behavior that involved not only a personally transmitted
tradition but also discussion and communal use. Moving away from
this made both learning to read and reading itself easier, and
contributed to a greater sense of individuality for the reader.
Although breaking ties of authority and group restraint marked a real
advance, the accompanying loss of community and cooperation should
not be underestimated. As Plato, who more or less invented prose as
an art instead of a simple expedient, observed, one of the costs of basic
literacy was a loss in memory. This can still be seen in parts of the
world where "pre-literate" people look askance at anthropologists,
missionaries, etc. who can't remember events precisely and
conversations verbatim for very long.

Advances in legibility made it easier for people to learn how to
read, and by the mid 14th century, literacy rates were higher than they
had been since the days of the Roman Empire, probably exceeding
those of the classic Roman world. From a contemporary point of view,
it's hard to see any loss in that. The increase in the number of people
who could read contributed to the success of movable type: to put it in
modern terms, an industry of this sort needs a fair number of
consumers to amortize production costs and allow an acceptable profit
margin. People writing on the revolution in communication of the mid
15th century stress the mechanics of invention because it's easy to do,
and in doing so they can create semi-mythic heroes like Guttenberg,
yet the center of the story is the social and economic dynamics that
made print viable. The rise of a middle class that could afford books
and wanted the prestige associated with them, and strangely
subversive religious groups such as the Brothers of the Common Life,
actively engaged in teaching reading to all social strata, created a
strong push toward more legible writing and a larger output of books.
The same applies to most technological advances. If Charlemagne
could have commissioned a telephone, what could he have done with
it? He could not have set up a hotline to Haroon al Rashid without the
support of hundreds of thousands of telephone users and thousands of
workers who could set up and operate telephone networks.

Since the 15th century, refinements have continued along
similar lines. By the 16th century, savants in England and France
were clamoring for standardized orthography. Since English and
French are essentially creoles, spelling was considerably more
confusing than for languages such as Italian that followed a different
evolutionary path. This reform went over somewhat better in France
than in England, and since it was conducted in part by scholar-
printer-publishers, it is one of the reasons why French continues to use
diacritical markings. But serious standardization had to wait for
ideological and technical changes before becoming absolute. After the
U.S war for independence, the puritan element in the U.S. found an
outlet for its need to control every detail of life in figures like Noah
Webster, who equated standardization with moral probity, and saw
correct spelling as next to Godliness. The need to repress unruliness of
any sort runs under the surface of Webster's spelling bees and related
activities, and forms part of the basis for the regimentation, and hence
cost efficiency, of mass education. This kind of regimentation and
quashing of individuality played a crucial role in creating the
industrial workforce of 19th century America. The task of breaking
the spirits of agrarian workers so they could make efficient factory
drones had to come in the guise of education, and, since it was aimed
at children, required an element of play. The same system of
imbedding standardization in the psyches of children also helped
make them good consumers, willing to accept standardized products,
putting aside the long tradition of bargaining for something better in
daily transactions. It's hard to argue against mass education, but since
one of its major advance evolved as an adjunct to wage slavery, it's
also hard to miss the losses involved -- and hard not to wish it had
been brought about in a better way.

Book production went through several related stages of
development. For the most part, renaissance printers worked their type
to the point of near illegibility. This and the rough finishes of the
papers they used required a hefty punch in impression. As markets
expanded, consumer purchasing power increased, and smoother
printing surfaces became more readily available, printers strove for a
greater evenness of impression and inking. Binders worked towards
simpler and quicker methods. Since books could be mass produced,
they didn't have to last long: this took a great deal of strain off the
book binders as it took the strain off of the bindings of individual
books.

As books became standardized, it became possible for some
people to read silently more quickly than they could speak. This
capability has been systematized and codified in the 20th century as
speed reading. Taught nearly everywhere, to children and adults alike,
this ability can allow an adept to read more in a week than
Shakespeare read in his lifetime. When the 20th century was still
relatively young, Beatrice Warde published her most important essay
"The Crystal Goblet." This work stands with such classics as
Trithemius's De Laude Scriptorum as a landmark in the history of
commentary on book making and reading. In it she argued that type
and all other aspects of book production should be "transparent."
Using the analogy of a drinking glass, she maintained that someone
who appreciates wine would prefer a glass that showed and delivered
the wine to its fullest advantage, without any hindrance or distraction
from ornament or irregularity. She extended the metaphor in several
ways: the stem of the glass, for instance, was analogous to the margins
of a printed page: both stem and margins provide handles so the
fingers of the drinker or reader don't cover the real prize. According
to Ms. Warde, nothing should come between the reader and the words
and ideas of the author. These are noble sentiments, and many elegant
books have been produced by people who have taken Ms. Warde
seriously, almost as Gospel. Unfortunately, the craftspeople who have
followed Ms. Warde have been a tiny minority of book producers. The
way things have worked out in practice has gone in a different
direction, not toward craftsmanly restraint and selfless devotion to
literature, but toward homogenized banality, and the worst breach of
transparency possible: the obscuring of text under the illusion of
transparency.

Many who argue against electronic publishing claim that
computers will turn us into data processors instead of readers. That
has already happened. Nearly all of the developments that have moved
writing toward greater legibility have moved it farther away from
speech, something that exists in what the producers of audio
recordings call "real-time," and toward a completely cerebral rate of
assimilation. At the same time, these developments have moved
writing away from expressive forms of visualization. Standardized
appearance of text has had the odd effect of making visual innovations
in design all look alike because we have become fixated on the
illusion of transparency. In effect, we were turning ourselves into data
processors long before Turing started tinkering with his computing
devices. Without that transformation, computers of the modern type
probably could not have been made.

For many purposes, reading as data assimilation has its
advantages. Given the volume of information with which the
contemporary world seems to overwhelm us, the ability to assimilate a
large volume of data may aid many people in making crucial
decisions. If you're going downriver in a boat, you can only steer if
you're moving faster than the current of the water. Then again, if you
are required to make decisions before you've thought them through or
even had time to check your basic instincts, you're probably going to
make a lot of serious mistakes.

For most of what we think of as literature, and for the book as
an art form, this development has been a disaster. Nowhere is this
more evident than in poetry. Traditionally, poetry, like its near
relative music, is an art based in time. When you start distorting time
in poetry, you destroy it. To clarify this, let's use recordings of music
as an example. If you play a 33 1/3 rpm record at 45 rpm, you will not
only change the tempo, you'll also change the pitch. This applies
equally to contemporary heavy metal rock and its 19th century
predecessor, the operas of Wagner and Verdi; the music of John
Coltrane and his 18th century antecedent, Johann Sebastian Bach.
Changes in perception of time aided by reading rates causes serious
problems in all areas of contemporary life, from the ability to handle
anticipation to attention spans to the ability to make realistic plans
and projections. With the advent of television came a quantum leap in
distortion of perceptions of time. On one level, it brought about a
greater desire for acquiring goods immediately, which in turn
encouraged purchases on credit, in some instances reinstating
perpetual cycles of debt. On another level, the time slots allotted for
programs brought the mechanical schedule of the factory into peoples
daily lives. Watching television also prepared people for using
computers, which resemble televisions with keyboards.

Perhaps no other change in the history of literacy has developed
as quickly as the move to computer technology. It's nature would be
hard to describe at this point, as its direction is still uncertain. It will
probably take a long time for it to be possible to chart the gains and
losses of the last decade, and changes will probably continue at an
accelerating rate in the future. Even a simple list of pros and cons is a
strange sort of seesaw of arguments.

For a minority (including me), computer technology has allowed
people to work at home, setting their own schedules and reintegrating
work with the rest of their lives. Many of these people can find and
exploit niches in the economy that can't be handled profitably by
larger corporations, and the volume of work they can turn out with the
new technology gives them greater earning power than they could
hope for under other circumstances. Computer usage gives many
handicapped people who would otherwise be virtually unemployable
the ability to earn a decent living. An example of this is the husband
of a colleague of mine. He is blind, yet he works as a computer
programmer. Instead of reading from a monitor, he reads from a pad
over rods that produce Braille characters. My colleague first met him
at a computer users' group, which suggests that computers need not be
as isolating as many claim. There's no way that we can rightfully
disparage the benefits to many handicapped people that computers
have brought about.

But at this time, data feeds on data, and the techno-industrial
complex that universal literacy made possible needs large numbers of
people to gather, enter, transfer, and otherwise manipulate data. In the
industrial world this has lead to computerized sweatshops that seem
little better than those of the 19th century. In the U.S., much of this
corpse of data workers are "temps," people employed on a temporary
basis at a pay scale below minimum wage, with no health, retirement,
or other benefits. People in these data pools often develop job-related
health problems that limit the number of years they can work. With
union formation difficult if not impossible for temps, this makes them
disposable workers. Often their rate of input is monitored through the
computer systems on which they work, and they are docked or fired if
they don't maintain a predetermined speed. In many instances, simple
amenities such as coffee breaks, time to go to the bathroom, the
keeping of personal items such as family pictures at workstations are
strictly prohibited.

In time, the functions of many of these workers could be taken
over by more sophisticated computers. Combining computers with
robotics has already taken over some services and types of industrial
production, including unhealthy jobs in both data processing and in
computer chip manufacture. Ideally, this could mean a lot less
drudgery for everyone. But this is simply another form of one of the
old dilemmas of capitalism: without some means of distributing the
advantage of reduced labor, it would simply mean the impoverishment
of larger numbers of people.

Computers linked to the internet can work wonders in
education, making vast resources available to schools with minuscule
budgets, and making home schooling more practical. Students can
learn at their own pace, and there are few more effective teaching
methods than repeatedly correcting your own mistakes, as you do with
a computer. The video game aspect of computers finds one of its most
salutary uses among children. Those with learning disabilities, minor
to major, can often overcome them or learn coping skills without
social stigma or personal ridicule from teachers or other students.
Through the net, many students can reach beyond the prejudices and
limitations of their parents and teachers. Perhaps the fear of this is a
major, though unspoken and perhaps unrealized, motive in the drive
for censorship in the U.S. To quote Barlow, "You are terrified of your
own children because they are natives in a country where you will
always be immigrants."

At the same time, a lot of what can be learned from computers
has to do with the manipulation of information, not the conduct of life
in the world. Many human teachers don't go for more than
information transfer as is, but still computers can only make a bad
situation worse. Data manipulation in favor of action and involvement
in a larger context could act as a greater force in pacification and
control of people than any programming that might be run in a
computer. The earlier people become used to data in favor of
experience, the more malleable they may become. If too much reliance
is placed on computers, it can encourage solipsism and delusions of
power or invulnerability. Computer dependency may hamper or
eliminate social relations with teachers and other children, producing
the kind of nerds that are at present more readily found in comics than
in the world. Although the video game aspect of computers can make
some sorts of learning fun, and hence encourage the students, it can
also strongly deter students from learning that which is difficult, that
which is *not* fun. Most of the most important things a child can
learn are not fun and cannot be made so. If all a child learns is how to
move little images around on a screen, he becomes little more than
one of those little images himself. Instead of the computer being an
extension of the brain, as the McCluhanites would put it, the child
becomes an accessory or, in computer sales terms, a "peripheral" of
the software.

There is an interesting parallel between software and Noah
Webster's spelling bees. The first generation of post-mainframe
software was based completely on text -- no images, no mice or other
selecting or drawing devices. What you saw on the screen was no
more than the letters you could type on a standard keyboard. This was
largely supplanted within a few years by mouse operated graphic
interfaces. In some instances, you can run elaborate programs without
using a keyboard at all. These interfaces make computer use easier
and more fun for many people. These cheerful interfaces made a
quantum leap in the video game aspect of computing: no matter what
task you're performing, you're always moving little figures around,
while the computer responds with other images, many of them
animated. This can take some of the strain off of work and make it
more pleasant. It's interesting to note how computer magazines
increased enormously in response to proliferating "user friendly"
software. It's hard to find a newsstand in the U.S. today that doesn't
carry at least a dozen computer magazines. Surely no other machinery
has become a national hobby or sport the way computers have. When
changes in computing occur at a dizzying rate, the video game
component may be necessary for most users to learn new programs
quickly enough to keep up with the demands placed on them as
computers take over more functions. At the same time, the video game
can encourage the user, particularly the younger user, to see work and
life as a video game, and find it more difficult to cope with anything
that doesn't work the same way. On the most sinister level, it may be
no accident that the Gulf War, presented by U.S. television as a video
game, occurred during the period when graphic interfaces were
generating large scale euphoria.

Another interesting parallel to graphic interfaces is the pre-
columbian writing systems of central Mexico. This area was a sort of
bottleneck for the indigenous peoples of the Americas in their patterns
of migration and settlement. Here many distinct groups with different
languages came together, lived in close proximity to each other, and
often produced cultural, linguistic, and physiological hybrids. The
writing systems of this area (as distinct from the Mayan systems to the
south) were iconographic -- that is, they were based on common icons
instead of spoken languages, so that people who spoke different
languages could read them. The advantages of this for a densely
packed, heterogeneous population are obvious. The same may be
partially the case for icon based software in the increasingly
interdependent yet linguistically disparate world of today. In addition
to providing a crude common language, a system of icons associated
with words could more or less effortlessly work toward the creation or
acquisition of the rudiments of a universal spoken language.

The internet's ability to deliver mail around the world, often in a
matter of seconds, creates opportunities of all sorts. On one level, I
have been able to hold what amounts to conversations with people in
Europe and Asia by passing e-notes back and forth. On another level,
the speed of e- mail could allow coordinated action on a global scale.
This could have endless benefits for quickly mobilizing and
implementing political action. If a global federation of unions arose to
meet the problems of international capitalism, this speed of
communication would be absolutely essential. It already has been in
some environmental and human rights situations. On the other hand,
if people use the net primarily for frivolous purposes, it becomes a
good way of keeping large numbers of people from taking any kind of
meaningful action on anything even fixing the plumbing in their
homes.

The large number of diverse social and political organizations
present on the net surprises many people in the political mainstream.
It should not: the net didn't create that diversity, it simply allowed it to
manifest itself in a way that older media have not. It's possible that
exposure to alternatives could bring about changes in the attitudes of
people inured to a painfully narrow spectrum. At the same time, it
could help break down some of the insularity of people outside the
sphere of the centrists and lead to cooperation and reorientation of
activists of all sorts. On the other hand, the fear of such possibilities
could lead to paranoia and repression on the part of people in power,
accompanied not only by arrests, deportations, etc. but also attempts to
use the net as a tool for thought control.

"Would that all God's children were prophets" wrote William
Blake two centuries ago. In a sense, the proliferation of web sites
could move toward something like Blake's vision, with everyone who
had something to say in a position to be their own publisher, their own
prophet. This seems to open up possibilities for freedom of expression
almost beyond belief for the web, as long as it remains free and
uncensored. Once it becomes censored, it becomes at least as slanted,
as biased, and as stifling as the media we already have. A number of
companies and organizations, under the guise of everything from
protecting children to fighting sexism, are now engaged in a pitched
battle to disembowel the internet, and turn it into nothing more than a
means of peddling consumer trash. If this succeeds, the only
reasonable response to the success of the censors would be to sign off
the net completely and leave it to run as the lowest sewer of
capitalism, or be prepared to devote all your energy, resources, and
possibly your life to fighting the censors, to providing the grounds for
all to be prophets instead of extending the capacity to turn all God's
children into nothing more than corporate profits. The internet's
world wide web has the capacity to tailor every user's library to his or
her needs, something never before possible. On the other hand, the
web's potential for fragmentation has the potential for completely
destroying all sense of context and meaningful interrelation. If this
destruction of context became a way of thinking 'off' the web, in other
areas of life, it could easily become the new technology's most
completely, albeit most subtly, destructive characteristic.

This seesawing of pros and cons could be extended
considerably. I've just mentioned a few possibilities that seem
important to me. I'm sure other contributors will add more, and you
can find a wide proliferation of them in any computer magazine, or,
for that matter, nearly any newspaper. Instead of pursuing them
further, I'd like to make the pedestrian proposal I mentioned at the
beginning of this article. It's something that doesn't sound like much
in regard to the way we tend to see changes of the past. Okay here it
is: accept the technology provisionally and try to humanize it. Don't
accept it uncritically, don't be afraid to talk back to those who are
guided solely by McCluhanite determinism, and don't be afraid to go
against the grain. This of course does not mean making the new
media conform to the old or ignoring the many new positive
possibilities that new media may present us with that we did not
anticipate. Many enthusiasts at the present time argue that you are
doing something wrong if you do not do what is "appropriate to the
medium." It would be more appropriate at times when the new
technologies don't work for us to think in terms of "abusing the
medium before it abuses us." An open secret that most polemicist
seem to have missed or ignored in media discussion is that in the past
whole armies of people have humanized technology, usually by
working precisely counter to the grain, in small and usually
anonymous increments.

The contemporary world would be a much more depraved and
hellish place had they not done so. Now it is our turn. We seem to
have many resources with which to humanize technology unavailable
to people in the past.

One of the strongest deterrents to this kind of response is the
futility of dramatic gestures. There have been a number of people who
give themselves Luddite names, sometimes even calling themselves
Luddites, who write books and pull media stunts in protest against
"new technology." Presumably none of them has ever seen or even
considered the house-sized perfecting presses used to print their
books, nor would they consider relevant the improved worker safety in
the printing industry in the U.S. during recent years, which has
included improved machinery along with more intelligent use. But the
thing that strikes me as strangest about these charlatans is their
fondness for smashing computers with sledge hammers in front of tv
cameras. If they detest technology so much, why are they so enamored
of television? Perhaps because tv, unlike a computer, is a passive
medium? Whatever the case, stunts of this sort can do nothing to
change the course of computer development. If we step back a little,
we can see ways in which technologies could have been humanized by
smaller steps taken by individuals and associations. In a time when
everyone from teachers to secretaries had more clout than they do
now, if there had been a movement to replace the standard QWERTY
keyboard with the Dvorak layout, Dvorak keyboards would now be
standard. Does this sound unimportant? Check the thousands of
people who suffer from carpel tunnel syndrome and other disorders
related to the use of a keyboard that was designed for mechanical
expediency instead of human use. But in addition to that benefit,
talking back collectively on smaller issues can give us the strength
and the courage to talk back on larger ones. The way I usually argue
this is in relation to telephones: If you can't say no to something as
simple as call waiting, can you really expect to say no to something as
complex and ingrained as racism?

The world wide web allows people to link into any site they
choose. Although this can have many advantages, it can also
completely destroy the context and hence the significance of a text or
an image. My solution for this is to change file names whenever you
find someone making this kind of link to something at your, thus
sabotaging the link. A number of people criticize me for this, saying it
goes against the spirit of the web or the nature of the medium or
something of the sort. My answer is the spirit of the web or the nature
of the media be damned whenever its function is to falsify or distort
the labor of others. In like manner, many people with web sites take a
proprietary interest in what they have, and become highly defensive or
antagonistic when other people put up similar material, which they
see as an encroachment on their own turf. If those of us with web site
learned to cooperate with each other, we could share resources and
avoid duplication of labor in a way that would be a benefit to everyone
-- not simply the site holders, but readers as well. As important as
many small, incremental acts of rebellion and cooperation may be in
themselves, they may also be good practice for larger individual and
collective actions. A lot of discussion of computers deals with
education, and in a lot of this education is presumed to relate only to
children and young people. Perhaps the most important, and least
recognized, educational benefit of computers will come from
educating ourselves to say no and to say yes, and to know when to do
which. When it comes to collective action, there may be nothing more
effective than computer interconnectivity.

Beneath a lot of the pro media rhetoric runs perhaps the most
toxic strain of 20th century thought and history. that is the
"technological imperative." According to this notion, if you have a
tool you will be compelled to use it. One of the reasons often sited for
the U.S. use of nuclear weapons against Japan is the technological
imperative. We had it, hence we had no choice but to use it -- and
then spending 50 years making up lies about the necessity of its use.
Following this line of reasoning, since we now have the means of
annihilating the whole of the human race, we have no option in the
long run but self annihilation. If we can't guide and control the
development of computer technology (a technology we 'cannot' get rid
of), what chance do we have of preventing the ultimate genocide?
Looking at the future from the most optimistic point of view possible,
we could wonder if one of the main advantages of computer
technology may be to help us develop the self restraint and self
discipline (those characteristics so woefully lacking in states) that will
be necessary to prevent our self destruction.